I have been following Ted Cruz' political career closely ever since he orchestrated the government shutdown in the fall of 2013. His theatrical efforts were calculated to secure the support of bedrock conservatives for a future presidential bid. Yes, his ambitions were transparent even then. I condemned him at the time as a dangerous mix of P.T. Barnum and Joe McCarthy and I stand by that criticism today.
At least in a technical sense, Cruz is now the front-runner for the GOP nomination. He scored a decisive and somewhat unexpected victory in the Iowa caucus and he now leads in the delegate count, albeit by a margin of one. It is therefore appropriate to ask: Does he have a path to the Republican nomination? I believe that he does.
In the month of February, he has two main objectives. He must survive the New Hampshire primary. And he must win in South Carolina. Let's look at these two contests.
New Hampshire is not friendly territory. Cruz carried the day in Iowa on the strength of a hyper-mobilized evangelical base. New Hampshire, on the other hand, has a very different religious composition. A quarter of the population is Catholic. Mainline Protestants come next, and the largest two Protestant denominations are the United Church of Christ and the United Methodist Church. Ted Cruz' summons to "awaken the Body of Christ" in the name of an uncompromising conservative political agenda will not work with this New England audience.
So, what does Cruz need to do? He might hope to finish first in a deeply fractured field, though if the polling is accurate outright victory seems to be only a remote possibility. More realistically, he should want to finish no worse than third.
To do this, he will need to shift his message. For a New England electorate, he will likely downplay his religious appeal and emphasize other elements of his ultra-conservative platform. He will probably talk about his support for a balanced budget amendment and his opposition to bank bailouts. He will insist on the need to audit the Federal Reserve and sing vague but pleasing hymns to the magic of free markets. He must also campaign the New Hampshire way -- town hall appearances and small-group meetings with the voters.
Will he win New Hampshire if he does these things? Probably not. Time is short. But his goal in New Hampshire finally is not victory but the avoidance of humiliation. What he wants to do is to get to the next battlefield, which is South Carolina.
Look for South Carolina to be the most feverishly contested primary to date. The voting will occur on Saturday, February 20, and it will be South Carolina that makes or breaks the Ted Cruz campaign. It is telling that after his victory in Iowa, Cruz paid a call on supporters in Greenville, South Carolina, in the Upstate region. South Carolina is a Ted Cruz kind of state.
The religious demography is all in his favor. In Iowa, Cruz was the beneficiary of a record-setting turnout by evangelical voters, who made up 64 % of Republican caucus-goers. Evangelical Protestants, particularly Baptists, make up the largest part of South Carolina's religiously-affiliated population, and have historically proven to be foundational support for the Republican Party. Cruz must ensure that these voters turn out and support him in large numbers. He has a significant grassroots operation already in place. His main competitor for the South Carolina religious-right vote is Donald Trump (it is difficult to see the Ben Carson campaign remaining viable through February 20).
My guess is that Cruz will be totally ruthless in his campaigning. He proved in Iowa that he could do that, and we shall more of it in South Carolina. We shall see attacks on "New York values" and whisper campaigns of the sort we saw directed against Ben Carson in Iowa.
But if Cruz wants to use South Carolina as a launching pad for further success, he will need to move beyond narrow appeals to the religious right. My prediction is that he will play to one of his strengths -- his perceived reputation as a constitutional lawyer. He will single out in particular the two Supreme Court decisions that jointly upheld the constitutionality and legality of the Affordable Care Act, NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), and King v. Burwell (2015).
Both of these decisions were written by Chief Justice John Roberts. In their reasoning, they represent a conservative interpretation of the law, but one that is friendly to sustaining legislative intent. I can, however, foresee Cruz challenging these opinions relentlessly. A third case he will target, furthermore, is Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the same-sex marriage decision authored by Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, like Roberts, a Republican appointee.
Cruz will criticize these decisions as betrayals of conservative principle. He will denounce them as representative of the timidity of the Republican establishment. He will, in other words, build a case for what he likes to call "constitutional conservatism" and use that to discredit the Republican establishment and thereby win South Carolina. And then he means to use South Carolina to propel him to victory in the Super Tuesday contests ten days later. In other words, Ted Cruz means to run to the right of John Roberts, perhaps the most conservative Supreme Court justice since the 1920's!
The damage that such a campaign will cause to the American body politic will be significant. I am a firm believer that health care is a basic right. If I have a problem with the Affordable Care Act it is that the law does not go far enough in ensuring health care for all. I am also a strong defender of same-sex marriage and the Obergefell decision. Cruz is ruthless, however, and nakedly ambitious, and if it moves him closer to the Republican nomination, I can easily see him waging a scurrilous campaign against the Supreme Court.
Cruz' goal is to carry South Carolina by a large enough margin that he should do well in Super Tuesday's southern primaries -- Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. If he prevails in those states, his road to the Republican nomination may well be clear.
In many respects, I find Ted Cruz to be an even more troubling candidate than Donald Trump. Trump is a nativist and a xenophobe. But Cruz is something new on the American scene -- a religious zealot with a strong chance of becoming the nominee of one of America's two major political parties. He is half demagogue, half conspiracy theorist, and he means to be elected president. We should all be worried about that.